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India and China deployed in 'large numbers' in border showdown: foreign ministry @AFP Law & Politics |
India acknowledged for the first time Thursday that it has matched China in massing troops at their contested Himalayan border region after a deadly clash this month.
"A continuation of the current situation would only vitiate the atmosphere for the development of the relationship."
China has accused Indian forces of causing the June 15 battle by attacking its troops.
Beijing has also called on India "to immediately stop all infringing and provocative actions."
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"It was the year 2020'' @DavidBCollum World Of Finance |
"It was the year 2020. Antiracist activists tore down statues of Abe Lincoln. The leading Presidential candidate was suffering from dementia. The Federal Reserve was monetizing junk corporate bonds. The economy had been destroyed by covid-19. Equities were at all-time highs." |
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China is reshaping the global news landscape and weakening the Fourth Estate @guardian Law & Politics |
But during our research for the International Federation of Journalists, we found that Beijing is increasingly outsourcing the storytelling to foreign journalists, who often end up amplifying its messages in their own languages in the pages of their own news outlets.
At one roundtable discussion in Myanmar, all journalists present had been on all-expenses paid tours to China. One had been nine times.
While some were bowled over by China’s modernity and technological developments, others said they’d signed agreements promising not to write critical reports.
However, our analysis suggests that Beijing is targeting journalists from developing countries with repressive, ineffective governments, in particular those who have signed up to its massive global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
Under the title of “Silk Road Celebrity China Tours”, Beijing has even taken Muslim journalists to visit the re-education camps where it’s holding as many as 1 million Uighurs.
“They all wrote about how beautiful [Xinjiang is] or certain stories praising China for cracking down on terrorists,” one Filipino journalist remarked.This spans the whole gamut from a couple of computers and tape recorders donated to one journalism union in tiny Guinea-Bissau, all the way up to a state-of-the-art studio built with Chinese funding for the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.
In India, the UC News browser – which is in Hindi and 15 other local languages – has 50 million users.
Despite clashes on the border, it is hard to find a single story on China-India border tensions.
Such media ventures risk becoming chokeholds on global news delivery systems, potentially denying other narratives outside Beijing’s favoured version while embedding Chinese influence in media ecosystems far outside its borders.
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R_14_14 (World) = 1.19 @oli3be Misc. |
R_d1_d2=(1+d1_Delta[CAC])^(d2/d1)
CAC=Confirmed Active Cases=Confirmed Cases-Recovered-Deaths
d1: Average
d2 : Contagiousness
R_d1_d2:
< 1 : CAC ▼
> 1 & ► : CAC ▲▲ EXPONENTIAL
> 1 & ▲ : CAC ▲▲▲ more than expo
> 1 & ▼ : CAC ▲ not expo
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#COVID19 and the Spillover Moment Misc. |
―They fancied themselves free, wrote Camus, ―and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
―In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.
A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.
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Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 2 Vanity[a] of vanities, says the Preacher Misc. |
Vanity[a] of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens[b] to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,[c]
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things[d] yet to be
among those who come after.
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Darkened Duty-Free Shops Are Fueling a Worldwide Chocolate Glut @markets Retail & Manufacturing |
When commodity analyst Judy Ganes spent 36 hours flying home from a business trip to Asia, it was what she didn’t see that stuck with her.
In the four airports she passed through, Ganes found almost no food courts or duty-free shops open for business.
No snow globes. No t-shirts. No special liquor bottles. And perhaps most importantly, no Toblerone and other specialty chocolates that are ubiquitous in international terminals.
The drop in duty-free sales has exacerbated the global economic downturn that’s thrown the $107 billion chocolate market into disarray, helping turn a global deficit into a glut.There were 471,421 airline passengers in the U.S. on June 23, compared with 2.51 million on the same weekday a year earlier, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
“In San Francisco all closed. In Newark, the only thing open was one grab and go place that had a rack with chips and gummies for 50% off.”
The International Monetary Fund lowered its outlook for the world economy, signaling a further hit to cocoa consumption, which tends to closely follow gross domestic product.
Mondelez International Inc. said in April that its world travel retail section is expected to see significant declines. The company has previously said travel represents about a third of the demand for Toblerone.
Brown-Forman Corp., the makers of Jack Daniels, said in a June 9 earnings call that its global travel retail segment, which includes duty-free sales, was down around 65%.
Still, slack demand will probably help flip the global market to a surplus of more than 300,000 tons from a deficit a year earlier, according to Eric Bergman, vice president at JSG Commodities in Connecticut. |
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Virus Takes Root in Venezuela Oil Town Already in Collapse Misc. |
Blood stains on the walls and floors. Cockroaches and rats in hallways. And several dozen Covid-19 patients per ward, but only two nurses and one bathroom.
Ever since the coronavirus started coursing through Latin America in March, health experts worried what would happen if the pandemic took root in embattled Venezuela.
In the hot and humid coastal city of Maracaibo, that day has arrived.
Medical staff described how patients -- some of them lying on dirty floors -- wait two or three days for care. Some collapse before a stretcher becomes available.
The health workers talk of x-ray machines that are broken, frequent power outages and bathrooms without running water.
One hospital physician said they are seeing people with coronavirus symptoms die each day without ever getting a diagnosis. More are dying at home -- many don’t even bother trying to see a doctor now.
Zulia now has about 600 confirmed infections, or 14% of the country’s total. More than half of those can be traced to Las Pulgas, a popular open-air market in Maracaibo spread out across trash-covered streets where thousands of vendors sell fruit, meat and household products.
Last week, President Nicolas Maduro blamed the outbreak on countrymen flowing in from Colombia, which shares a porous border with Venezuela and Brazil -- a global epicenter for the disease.
They are “contaminating their entire families,” he said in a televised address. More than two-thirds of Venezuela’s roughly 4,200 cases are among people who returned from other countries.
Thirty nine-year-old Jose Vera went to University Hospital with mild symptoms and spent two weeks sharing a room with four patients and no air conditioning in the 88-degree weather.
He was later taken to a motel, guarded by soldiers, where he’s been for 13 days waiting for his test results to confirm whether or not he has Covid-19.
“The hospital is completely collapsed,” Vera said by phone. “I saw people in serious condition sitting in chairs all day waiting to be attended.”
At University Hospital, some nurses and doctors have stopped showing up altogether, fearing they’ll get sick too as they’re forced to recycle masks and wash their hands in buckets of water, said Hania Salazar, president of Zulia’s Nurses Guild.
The board of directors for the Zulia physicians association said in a June 21 statement that 44 doctors had already caught the respiratory illness.
Two died and two more are in intensive care.
In a city where residents are malnourished and homes have no running water, the virus is proving catastrophic.
''The virus thrives on misery,” one doctor said.
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Malawi media give opposition candidate 55% lead in presidential election Law & Politics |
BLANTYRE, June 24 (Reuters) - Malawi’s state and private media on Wednesday gave opposition leader Lazarus Chakwera a comfortable 55% lead in its presidential election re-run, with nearly three-quarters of votes counted, but there was still no official tally.
The state-owned Malawi Broadcasting Corporation and private media all had Chakwera with 55% or more, with President Peter Mutharika at 40%.
At a news conference late on Wednesday, Electoral Commission chairman Chifundo Kachale urged Malawians to be patient and await the official results, which he said were taking time because they wanted to get “a credible record.”
“We are doing it manually. We’ll use records from district tally centres and district commissioners, not social media. Our appeal to Malawians is to be patient,” Kachale said.
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Zimbabwe President @edmnangagwa Warns ‘End Is Coming’ for Economic Detractors @economics Law & Politics |
“It has become apparent that in our midst there are wolves in sheep’s clothing. The end is coming.”
The 77-year-old leader has ruled Zimbabwe since late 2017, after a coup ended former President Robert Mugabe’s rule.
He inherited a nation beset by U.S. and European sanctions on its leaders and state companies, $9 billion of debt and an economy decimated by the state’s seizure of commercial farms that accounted for much of its exports.
Mnangagwa’s attempts to stabilize the economy have borne little fruit -- consumer inflation is running at 786%, the country’s recently revived currency has collapsed and the World Bank estimates the economy will shrink as much as 10% this year.
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21-JAN-2019 :: The Mind Game that ZANU-PF played on its citizens has evaporated in a puff of smoke Law & Politics |
I have been reading Yuval Noah Harari and in his best-seller he says this about money;
“Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
“Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.”
The Point I am seeking to make is that There is a correlation between high Inflation and revolutionary conditions,
Zimbabwe is a classic example where there are $9.3 billion of Zollars in banks compared to $200 million in reserves, official data showed.
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02-MAR-2020 :: The #COVID19 and SSA and the R Word Africa |
We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world. Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ... then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!
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